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Conferences are a great way to pick up new ideas but more importantly are a chance to talk “SEO” without people around you screaming with boredom! SEO conferences are generally laid back affairs but be aware the following 15 actions may get you blacklisted from any future events.

2. Get Paralytic at the Bar

Any sensible person knows the bar is were the majority real SEO activity occurs during a conference. Attempting to drink your own body weight in Gin and trying to show off your new party trick is not a good idea.

3. Give Away that Amazing Niche with No Competition

You’re in an SEO conference, enough said.

4. Try and Sell Yourself or Your Services

If you try and sell links, domains etc all you’re gonna do is piss people off. You could try to sell your body but I know of no domain or link that is worth that feeling you feel in the morning.

5.“Do a Borat” (run naked through the conference)

Yeah it’s funny on film, but if you try it for real like you’ll find it’s the quickest way to meet the security team and waste your entrance fee. I know what you’re thinking, but even if you get a thousand back links every one in the SEO world will have seen your wiener, not good if it’s a cold day!

6. Going on, and on, and…..

You’ve been asked to give a talk at an SEO conference, your is head spinning with ideas. You envisage Rand Fishkin looking up at you with awe and respect..all this is understandable. It does not, however, mean that you have to be one of those guys who spends two and a half hours explaining how you spent six months getting a pr 7 back link. Keep it short and to the point, after all isn’t that what you would want if you were listening?

7. Wet Yourself When You Meet an SEO Idol

Ok, I know you probably spend hours blog commenting, tweeting and following every word of Fiskin et al, but you have to remember that the Danny Sullivan’s and Michael Gray’s of the world are REAL PEOPLE and not demigods. Treat them as such.

8. Suck Up to The Speaker

It’s only natural that you want to make an impression, we all do. Repeatedly telling the speaker how amazing he (or she) is, but endlessly waffling about how incredible their talk was is not the way to go about it. In fact you’ll probably find the buffet a very lonely place, as nobody will want to talk to you.

9. Over Use Slides With Too Much Text

The human attention span is very limited. To combat this, it’s best to think you are presenting to an audience of Homer Simpsons, keep the slides to a minimum (less than ten), use lots of pictures and go easy on the text. Even the most die hard nerd won’t read all your slides on maximising in the SERP’s if you have 100 slides packed with 10 bullet points per slide.

10. Be That “Question” Guy

You know the one…that guy who asks loads of pointless questions over and over….No? Then you’re him. If you feel the need to ask a question about what makes an article link bait for the 169th time, just take a second and feel the hatred emanating your way!

11. Say in passing “ SEO is not Rocket Science”

Do you remember the stink Dave Pasternack caused when he said that “SEO is not Rocket Science?” It’s unlikely to earn you any friends if you start spouting out this phrase and it’s likely that you will find an SEO competition for your name when you get home!

Call tracking is an idea thought up by marketing companies to use as a tool to track which strategies are producing the most return on each advertising dollar.

The idea of call tracking is pretty simple. A business sets up an account with a calling service that provides them with several different phone numbers that all ring at the business. A different one of these phone numbers is then used for the business listing for each advertising source. Once in place, the call system software can then monitor which numbers are calling the business with the most frequency and the owner will know immediately which advertising is paying off and which isn’t producing results. This sounds like a good idea, but in the age of Google Local Business Listings and local seo it can have an adverse effect on page rankings. Here’s why.

In traditional Search Engine Optimization for websites, the primary factor for determining page rank is the number of back links, or other sites that have links to the ranked site. However for businesses, even extremely popular and reliable businesses may not have a web page to link back to. This can skew the results and make a relatively unpopular business with a well optimized web page rank above a huge business without a site. To correct for this, Google and other local search providers reduced the importance given to back links and instead rely on what are called citations. Citations are simply a reference to the business somewhere in the vast world of cyber space. A citation is something that lists the business’s name & phone number, name & address, or both. In local SEO parlance this is called the name, address, phone number or NAP factor. Are you beginning to see why having multiple numbers can be bad?

Local searches use what are called trust factors. These are merely consistent indicators that a particular listing is legitimate and refers to what the engine thinks it does. This makes having all of you business information standardized across the board. Multiple numbers can confuse the engine and citations will be disregarded as unreliable. In the world of local searches, a business’s NAP is how they are identified. It’s the DNA of online business listings.

If a marketing company is telling you that call tracking is a good idea, then you might want to reconsider your company. At least give them a pop quiz and make them tell you exactly how such a technique will not affect your local listings. Be prepared for a song and dance.